25 de marzo de 2016

Remote – Jesse McLean

The title of this work refers both to things that are far away and to the television remote control. In Jesse McLean's video, "remote" should be taken to express its strangest and most hostile adjectival meanings in order to connect the sinister character of the unknown with a troubling display of sounds and images recorded on video. The presence of an invisible and persistent ancestral life force gives shape to a hyperbolic leitmotif that, once tracing a dismal path, invites spectators to satiate their visual appetites.

Jesse McLean appropriates images from nightmarish scenes to devise an evocative sequence of phantasmagorical sets, dimly lit scenes and supposedly tormented subjective gazes, all of which are accompanied by a moving soundtrack. By selecting dozens of fragments from horror films - edited together as a collage along with original footage of devastating landscapes - the filmmaker recalls the common clichés of sinister fictional works, while eluding any explicit horror. The monstrous, morbid and violent elements of the original films disappear, prompting a suspended state of alertness, a sensation of permanent danger, which also pays homage to the cinephilic rage felt in relation to the television screen.

The attraction towards the representation of fear, experienced in a safe and placid everyday setting, is visualized in a piece whose subtle sound design - evanescent textures, unexpected noises and trembling monologues - induces a nightmarish dream state with ambiguous conclusions. The Freudian concept of Unheimliche - the ominous, a sudden feeling of terror towards something that is familiar - is constantly invoked in its auditory dimension; however, it is ultimately embodied visually by a motionless hand discretely emerging from the swamp. If the remote is far away from a physical perspective; paradoxically, what the remote expresses could be perceived in our minds as close-at-hand.

Often the diabolical makes itself known during the mind's unpredictable journeys while dreaming, always with the eyes closed. It is during this unconscious unfolding of dreams when all that is negated during waking life can be revealed in a discerning light. In Remote, the flux of heard and imagined events is marked by a highly oneiric causal development where "the impacting eruption of electric energy" is only a thematic pretext to confront the silence and darkness of fear.Versión es español:Partículas elementales